Elena Riedo, Psy.D.Licensed psychologist, CSAT, EMDR therapistFull Circle Recovery
A CSAT is a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist: a licensed mental health professional who has completed rigorous training in sexual addiction, compulsive sexual behavior, pornography that has taken over, affairs, and the shock that hits a partner after discovery. Many adults look for counseling after an affair, or after pornography has taken over at home, long before they know the word CSAT. At Psychology Care Associates, that specialty work is done by Elena Riedo, Psy.D., and sessions are available by telehealth throughout Texas.
The credential is not a personality type and not a weekend badge. It is supervised training in a specific method that assesses the behavior, interrupts the cycle, treats what sits underneath it, and takes the injury to the partner as seriously as the acting out. The training follows the work of Patrick Carnes, Ph.D., and the 30-task model that still structures this specialty.
Who Patrick Carnes is
Patrick Carnes is the psychologist who put sexual addiction on the clinical map more than 30 years ago. Out of the Shadows named a pattern many adults had been carrying as private shame: preoccupation, ritual, compulsive sexual behavior, despair, then the same loop again. He later built a training path so the method could be taught and supervised with care, instead of being improvised from slogans or borrowed from general counseling alone.
CSAT training is open only to clinicians who are already licensed mental health professionals, or firmly on that path, because the work asks for a full clinical foundation before specialty methods are added. It is a multi-module program completed over time under supervision, grounded in assessment data, a structured model of compulsive sexual behavior, and evidence-informed practices that have remained the field’s primary standard since this training was first established. The modules move through careful evaluation, the cycle that drives the behavior, the betrayed partner and formal disclosure, trauma that often sits underneath, and longer-term recovery. Renewal is required, which keeps the credential from becoming a one-time title.
The method: tasks and performables
That same training leads into a concrete way of working. CSAT treatment is not open-ended conversation about desire. It is a task-centered plan. Carnes identified 30 recovery competencies. Each task has performables: written work, inventories, sobriety definitions, disclosure preparation, amends that are not performances, and concrete changes that can be seen.
The tasks are not always done in a straight line. Early work is stopping the behavior and telling the truth. Mid-work is shame, grief, trauma, and the other addictions that travel with this one. Later work is work, money, body, family, and intimacy. Couples work comes after there is one reality, not before.
Phase
Tasks
What the work is
Early recovery
1–7
Break denial. Understand the illness. Surrender to a process. Name the damage. Establish sobriety. Protect physical health. Build a culture of support.
Internal change
8–13
Reduce shame. Grieve. Face multiple addictions. See abuse cycles. Close the shame loop. Restore a relationship with the self.
Family involvement, boundaries, children and extended family, recommitment or a clean ending, coupleship, a spiritual life that is not a slogan.
A performable is the opposite of insight without evidence. If the task is sobriety, the performable is a written definition and a day that matches it. If the task is disclosure, the performable is a structured telling of the truth, not trickle truth extracted in a fight.
Books that carry the 30 tasks
No single paperback replaces a CSAT. The workbooks are meant to be done with the therapist. Together they cover the performable path.
Dr. Riedo uses the CSAT task model as the spine of treatment for compulsive sexual behavior, pornography addiction, infidelity that is part of a pattern, and the betrayal trauma that follows discovery. EMDR and DeTUR are added when the past or the urge itself is still running the present. The books are companions. They are not the treatment.
